Post-pandemic Public Administration: it’s time to get out of the cave
“It's time to get out of the cave: leave behind us the flickering shadows we have always been used to and come to terms with reality. The evidence tells us that the conditions are there: it is up to politics and the bureaucracy itself not to miss a historic and unrepeatable opportunity ”. The in-depth study by Alfredo Ferrante, public executive
The results of the sample survey "Pa engine of recovery: what actions for a competent, simple, smart and digital administration" that Forum Pa recently conducted on almost 1000 public administration employees are of great interest.
According to the results of the panel, public employees, when the administrations are asked to support the cycle of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan ( Pnrr ), approve the new approach to recruitment adopted by Minister Brunetta, highlighting that new experts in digital transformation, planning and control, of European projects, in a training framework that is still too lacking. Let's see some particularly relevant aspects that can help us put some questions in perspective.
According to workers in the public sector, the changes envisaged by the Public Function can significantly improve the hiring policies of administrations, especially by redefining the procedures for identifying staff needs (for 79.2% of respondents) and drastically reviewing the procedures of competitions through tests more aimed at verifying transversal skills (71.6%).
It is interesting that public employees themselves highlight that soft skills, the ability to know how to work and to operate even in critical situations, are an asset that must be cultivated in order to make the public administration grow. And they report significant imbalances: about half of the interviewees argues that the skills possessed are superior to those useful for their daily work or inadequate, a sign of some possible dysfunctions such as, for example, a poorly tailored recruitment to the needs of the organization and insufficient organizational capacity of the management, factors that they help to make the PA limp in a social framework which, on the other hand, shows a dynamism in geometric progression.
But it is training, among the many lights that come on, that is of particular interest: almost 60% of respondents say that in the last year they received training on legal-regulatory aspects (21% in matters related to management and only 10% in foreign languages) and that 92% have undertaken self-learning paths, often thanks to the tool of webinars (very widespread due to the pandemic emergency): a sign of the desire to improve their personal baggage by going further the traditional framework of knowledge of the formalistic-bureaucratic culture in stark contrast to the stereotype of the civil servant who is completely disinterested in his own mission. And precisely on the desired training, the gap between the current situation and the desired change is measured: among the new areas on which public employees want to be trained, transversal skills (teamwork, conflict management, problem solving, creativity) stand out, those related to digital transformation and organization, relational ones. In other words, it is precisely the workers of the public sector who identify all those aspects with a high transformative value that can give the necessary impetus to make a real change of cultural paradigm in our public machine. There are many elements that emerge from the panel, whose data deserve an in-depth reading, but these few traits may be sufficient for some context consideration.
The first: the pandemic, a real human and health disaster, nonetheless represents a precious opportunity to rethink ourselves as a society and the good news seems to be that politics, even with reference to the PA, seems to have grasped the meaning of the opportunity offered. , given both the attention paid to the administrations in this phase, also thanks to the need to implement the PNRR, and the decisive change of gear on the public narrative about bureaucracy.
The second: alongside the indispensable administrative-accounting knowledge, it is urgent to set up the recruitment and continuous training of public personnel in terms of people's skills. From this point of view, the propulsive thrust given by the massive use of agile work – albeit in its hybrid and necessarily homely form – during the period of the health emergency, which has placed staff and management in front of an aut: modify radically one's old modus operandi and adapt, orienting oneself with great difficulty to the result, or implode.
The third: the particularly lively moment that is going through the debate about the improvement of the public machine is useful for a reflection of perspective on what appears to be the rhetoric of the “PA of the best” returning to the page in the era of the PNRR. It seems, finally, that we are starting to seriously ask ourselves a fundamental question: which PA do we want to do what? It is a question that can only place us in a development perspective that obviously goes beyond the horizon of a legislature (or, worse, of an executive) and which imposes on politics a vision of at least one generation. And which obliges, at the same time, to begin to reconsider how to organize the transformation and the very functioning of public structures, bearing in mind that digitization is fundamental but, nevertheless, useful with respect to rethinking the processes and dynamics that have governed until recently the administrative machine. We talk about rhetoric because the idea of having a PA populated by perfectly performing women and men – almost infallible robots or archons called to direct the Platonic polis – goes hand in hand with the myth of the goal of the final and definitive reform of the PA itself.
It has not been fully understood so far, that is, that public administration is nothing more than an organization, perhaps the most complex in the country, and that, as such, it suffers from the problems of all organizations: it is based on people, the real capital. on which it rests, and, if not cared for appropriately and continuously throughout its life cycle, it risks withering and withering. If this is true, then, it makes little sense to imagine a PA of the best as working for a public administration that, in a process of continuous transformation, is capable of intelligently recruiting and putting the right people in the right place, valuing inclinations, vocations. and personal dimension. In short, it is time to get out of the cave, leave behind us the flickering shadows we have always been used to and come to terms with reality. The evidence tells us that the conditions are there: it is up to politics and the bureaucracy itself not to miss a historic and unrepeatable opportunity.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/la-pubblica-amministrazione-del-post-pandemia-e-ora-di-uscire-dalla-caverna/ on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 07:56:33 +0000.